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When we're automating mobile web and hybrid apps, it can be hard to know which selectors and locator strategies to use to find particular elements. Tools like Appium Desktop or uiautomatorviewer are no help here, but that's for a good reason: our browsers come with all the tools we need to solve this problem already.

Running your Appium tests in parallel is great, but using one Appium server doesn't scale to meet the needs of a production CI environment. For that, the best DIY option is Selenium Grid, which is a WebDriver-specific load balancer and proxy. Using Selenium Grid, you can easily add and remove capacity from your test grid, and mix in Selenium-based testing seamlessly alongside your Appium mobile tests.

Android devices record detailed system logs, commonly referred to as 'logcat' logs. These logs sometimes contain information pertinent to tests, and can be easily read and saved from remote devices through the various Appium clients.

Appium, combined with the power of Espresso, can finally break its way out of the black box testing model. Whether this is something you want to do is of course up to you, but using the mobile: backdoor method, you can trigger app-internal methods with arbitrary parameters.

Did you know that you can use Appium to do all kinds of things, including scripting your holiday donation to your favorite charity? Here's a little example to get you inspired to think out of the box with using Appium as a force of good in the world.

Add some sparkle to your Appium test by making elements flash! Not only a party trick, this can be a useful technique for debugging your test scripts to visually verify that you've got a handle on the elements you think you do!

The W3C Actions API is about more than building complex touch gestures. It extends to full control over the keyboard (virtual or real), and allows for fine-grained control of keystrokes. Using this portion of the Actions API, you can trigger key input in your app without having to first find an element and then use `sendKeys` on it specifically.

'Siri, how do I automate you with Appium?' While Siri won't have the answer to that question, this edition of Appium Pro does! You can test your app's SiriKit integrations using Appium's `siriCommand` method.

Web Components are an amazing new web standard that promises to ease the pain of code sharing and UI component reuse across your apps and across the web. They do, however, come with a few headaches for testing, since the very thing that makes Web Components sharable and reusable also makes their inner workings hidden from the outside world. There are several strategies for getting inside the Web Component Shadow DOM, however.

Using a special capability, you can automatically set the permissions necessary to test your app, which makes dealing with iOS system alerts authorizing those permissions a thing of the past. Some extra system setup is required to make this new capability work, but it's worth it.

Just as you can generate artificial text messages to an Android emulator, so you can also convince an emulator to believe it's receiving a phone call! Appium has a simple API for triggering incoming phone calls from arbitrary numbers, which can be useful for a variety of reasons, not least of which is making sure your app stays functional during a call.

This is the second part in a full tutorial on getting real iOS devices to work with Appium. Assuming everything is installed and set up correctly, this is what you need to do to make Appium work its magic.

Connecting an iOS device to your computer and setting it up to be automated by Appium for the first time can be challenging; follow along with this post to get all the details you need for a first-time installation

There's been a lot of discussion around the potential ramifications of AI for automated testing. While the debate will no doubt rage on, Appium and Test.ai have teamed up to release a simple integration which allows you to find elements using a machine learning model, making it possible to find icons in your app without knowing anything about your app or looking up selectors.

When using Chrome on Android, or Chrome-backed webviews, it is possible to retrieve logs written by web applications (or hybrid applications) to the browser console. Retrieving these logs is useful for a number of reasons, from observing app state to saving app-internal logs along with test artifacts.

A lot of information is transmitted through the browser console, some of which is very useful, especially in cases of app errors. Using the log retrieval capabilities of the Appium client, we can gather browser console messages for storage as a test artifact or even to make assertions on app state.

When automating web applications using Appium, we sometimes run into situations where clicking an element doesn't appear to do anything in our tests, even though clicking the element manually works. The nativeWebTap capability comes to our rescue!

We hear a lot (from Appium Pro and other places) about how it's not a good idea to use XPath. That's generally correct. There are times, however, when it is totally fine to use XPath, or when XPath is the only option. In this edition we take a look at how to write good XPath queries to minimize the XPath blast radius.

Appium automation doesn't necessarily stop at the edge of the screen. Your Android device has hardware buttons (power, volume control, etc...), and Appium gives you the ability to automate these as well, using a generic KeyEvent interface from Android.

We've already seen how to find elements by image, but this doesn't always work out of the box. There are a number of knobs, dials, and switches you can play with (in the form of Appium settings) that help modulate the behavior of the image matching procedures. These will help fine-tune and stabilize your find-by-element usage.

When you just can't find an element, whether because it's built using non-standard APIs or has no uniquely identifying markers, it's possible to fall back to image matching via a template image. This technique, when used appropriately, can help overcome roadblocks to automation.

Alerts in native mobile apps don't always work exactly the same way that alerts in web browsers do, which means we need a bit more than the WebDriver spec can give us. Appium has a special command to help manage the extra buttons that can be present in mobile alerts. In this edition we take a look at how it works on iOS.

Sometimes using the standard Action APIs leads to undesired behavior due to the not-always-perfect mapping between the WebDriver spec and the available mobile automation technologies Appium uses. That's why Appium also makes platform-specific action methods available for 'direct' access to underlying action automation methods.

The ability to automate all the actions a user could take is essential, and that extends to touch gestures like pinch, zoom, and tapping with custom durations. Appium can do all this and more, with its support of the W3C Actions API that allows the encoding of arbitrary touch input behavior.

The best way to achieve a speedy build when it's full of Appium tests is to run those tests in parallel. In this article, we explore how to set up parallel testing locally, utilizing either multiple Appium servers or just a single server hosting multiple sessions.

Rounding out this series on speed and reliability, we consider failure resolution strategies. How do you debug issues? How do you locate a problem in the Appium stack? Where do you report bugs? And so on.

One of the most common causes of instability or non-determinacy in tests is due to dependence on external services, like a backend API server. Often, when testing your app it is not really necessary to simultaneously test these backend services, and a 'mock' server can be used instead, which greatly increases both the speed and reliability of your tests.

Animations in mobile apps are part and parcel of the beautiful app experience we've all come to expect. They are, however, completely useless for testing. In this edition of the 'Fast and Reliable' series, we look at how to turn them off completely, or otherwise reduce them to speed up our tests and improve test stability.

You don't have to settle for 'default Appium'. If you find yourself in a place where you're experiencing issues, or want to try a different operational mode, there are a ton of desired capabilities you can check out that modulate the way Appium works under the hood. You might find that the problem you're experiencing has a well-known workaround in the form of a desired capability you can simply plug into your driver initialization.

Functional tests are kind of slow. It's sad, but it's a fact of life and something we don't need to get too concerned about if we remember that, just as in the Matrix, 'there is no spoon'! We can use a variety of techniques to set up app state directly, without having to automate the UI, so that our UI tests can test only the steps which we actually care about for a particular scenario.

Sometimes, for whatever reason, we need to interact with elements that Appium can't find as elements. What can we do when there's no element to call 'click()' on? Hacky things, that's what we do. But we do the hacky things as reliably as we can.

In this edition of the miniseries on speed and reliability of tests, we examine a very important aspect of writing any functional test: making sure that the app is in the state you expect before you attempt to interact with it. Here we learn how to ensure your assumptions about said state are correct.

Continuing a larger Appium Pro series on making tests more robust, in this episode we examine the various locator strategies available within Appium, when to use which, and other approaches and practices to making sure your elements are found and not lost.

In this article we start a series that takes a look at a collection of tips and best practices that all contribute to greater speed and reliability of your Appium tests. First off, we discuss the dreaded concept of test 'flakiness', and how we should approach this concept within the world of Appium.

Espresso and Appium?! That's right, you can access the power and reliability of Google's flagship Android automation technology from within Appium, retaining the ability to write WebDriver-compatible scripts in any programming language.

Hybrid apps contain both native and web components, melded together in some ratio to provide a single unified app experience for the user. With Appium and the various Context commands, it's possible to successfully automate both halves of hybrid apps across both iOS and Android.

Both iOS and Android allow copying and pasting of text and other types of content. Apps can hook into this native clipboard and provide custom experiences based on clipboard content. Appium gives you special commands to automate the clipboard across both platforms.

Push notifications are an essential part of many apps. How can you test that the appropriate messages are sent? Apple doesn't make it easy, but with Appium there's a way to solve the challenge by automating the notifications shade.

Sometimes you need a mobile software robot like Appium for something other than your day job. In this article I break down my AppiumConf 2018 demo, giving a behind-the-scenes tour of how I managed to coax Appium to act as the director of a software band which accompanied my performance of the original song 'Ghost in the Machine'.

Sometimes being able to automate your app-under-test (AUT) is not enough. People don't have just one app on their phone, and oftentimes your app depends on actions taken in another app. How do you test multi-app flows like this? With Appium, of course!

App usability is about more than functionality: if the user experience isn't snappy enough, it can be a big problem. Performance testing and analysis is an important phase of testing. Thankfully, Appium can gather performance data during the course of your iOS tests.

Mobile apps have the possibility of integrating with the core communications functions of mobile devices. For example, they can send or respond to SMS messages. When testing with Appium it's possible to generate SMS messages that show up on Android Emulators, that can be used as part of an app verification flow.

Running into problems with Appium can be a frustrating experience. Sometimes you just get a cryptic, unhelpful message as part of an error thrown in your client code. Where do you go next? The Appium logs! This is a guest post from Isaac Murchie on how to take advantage of reading the Appium logs to help understand what's going on and potentially resolve issues.

It's important to test that user data and user experiences are not broken due to changes between app version upgrades. Appium comes with some built-in app management commands that make it possible to test how your app behaves across versions, all within the context of one Appium session.

If you've used Appium for any length of time, you've probably encountered the sad fact that, sometimes, xpath element queries are slow. In this newsletter, we explore why that is the case for iOS, and explore the various alternatives to XPath available to us, especially the little-known 'class chain' locator strategy.

Appium tests are full-UI functional tests. They can take a long time to run. It's a good idea to look for shortcuts so that your tests don't have to spend a ton of time setting up state, and can instead focus on just the bare minimum they need to validate. With a little work, you can accomplish this using deep links in both iOS and Android.

It's important to test that user data and user experiences are not broken due to changes between app version upgrades. Appium provides some helpful commands to test iOS app upgrades all within the context of one Appium session.

Functional testing is not the only kind of testing that Appium supports. As a pure automation library, Appium can also be used in the service of performance testing. In this edition we take a look at an example of performance testing on Android, namely how to track memory usage over time and make assertions about it.

Appium is not just for native apps. One of the great things about Appium is being able to test multiple app modes. You can even use Appium to run tests against regular old web applications on mobile devices.

It's often necessary to automate the photo library of a device as part of testing a mobile app. But how do you ensure that photos you know about get there? In this edition, we walk through the methods required for doing this as part of your iOS app testing.